Graphic Novel Review: Slow Storm

Danica Novgorodoff's Slow Storm has more texture than depth, more color than shape, and more ambition than accomplishment, all of which suggests a graphic novelist in need of a little more experience or a better editor.

Novgorodoff, a 26-year-old designer at First Second, is determined to find common ground between two alienated souls in Kentucky's Oldham County, an overweight firefighter named Ursa Crain and an overwrought Mexican immigrant named Rafi.

Their paths cross in the melee of the spring tornado season when lightning puts the torch to the barn where Rafi is living and tending the thoroughbreds. Ursa's engine answers the alarm and she eventually pulls him from the smoldering wreckage .... but not before she finally cracks under the strain of a seemingly endless barrage of sexual harassment and sexist cracks from her crew mates. Infuriated by one last nasty dig at her weight, Crain locks one of the fire fighters inside the barn, leaving him to die in the inferno of flame and ash.

That would be Grim, her caustic younger brother.

That the kid eventually escapes from the barn, gagging on panic and smoke, hardly repairs the damage the murderous impulse does to Ursa's standing as a sympathetic narrator.

Rafi was brought across the border by the usual coyotes, and is waiting for his guardian angel to show up from among the usual suspects: San Antonio, patron saint of the lost; Maria, our lady of sorrows; San Cristobal, warden of wanderers; and the lumpy chick in the GMC truck and the fireman's hat. Because he is inexplicably blamed for the barn fire by his former employer, he remains on the lam, loping through the Kentucky bluegreen like the horses he loves, but each time Ursa checks the horizon, Rafi's silhouette is invariably outlined against the raging skies. At some point, the staging moves from the coincidental to the preposterous.

Novgorodoff's 2002 painting, "First Date"

The tornadoes and storm clouds rolling through Kentucky give Novgorodoff -- a Yale art major who has herded cows in the Andes, trained horses in Virginia and taught English in Ecuador -- plenty of room to plant explosions of color on the page. Most of her splash pages are gorgeous, but her inexperience with perspective and sequential storytelling begins to show when she's filling variations of the six-panel grid.

That said, I admire the texture and ambition that Novgorodoff brings to this tale of lost souls. For all its inconsistencies, there are numerous moments in Slow Storm that betray a Level 4 hurricane of talent.